Roderick

I'm always punctual when it comes to replying to people!

That was amazing, Wrestle, thank you.

I'm oddly excited about having joined the Telltale community! Is this normal? I never bought Telltale games before (though I've played Bone 1 and 2), and now that I've got this account on Telltale I'm all giddy. Monkey Island has something to do with it of course, but it's also the cool email I got in piratey writing and access to the forums with Jake posting MI wallpapers. It's pretty neat! On-topic: I hope the sound quality of the dialogue is excellent. I noticed these problems in Bone and S&M videos, so it's not unreasonable to expect Telltale to have dealt with these things by now, is it?

I was moderately enthused about this game until I actually saw it in action and it was exactly the same stuff as last time. I don't know what I was expecting though. It's just that; I saw Venice sprawled out underneath the player and I thought... meh, can't really be bothered. I hope I'm proven sincerely wrong though!

It works aaaaaand... I've paid for it. There! Tales of Monkey Island is mine, all miiiiine!

I have no idea what was happening in the Metroid trailer, but that might've been me. I got the idea that they were fusing multiple franchises? Like, Metroid and some random RPG? Otherwise, why put the '+ becoming x' between Team Ninja and Nintendo, suggesting a rivalry? Galaxy 2 was huge. I predicted it actually, but this will be no doubt fantastic.

Paypal is still offline. Maybe it's a European thing? I tried refreshing. There's time of course, but I just want to ride on the wave of enthusiast buying and showing appreciation here =)

Guilebrush is depressingly horrid. Fortunately you can just use the classic sprites, so there it is =D

It was borderline depressing to see Molyneux back in 'What The Fuck' world again, after his brief foray into actually making sense and trying to make a proper game with Fable 2. Also, Natal? I call shenanigans! And besides, it's clearly a reference to Satan.

Ah right, it's July. Thanks for clearing that up. I'm very excited about the new Monkey Island news. That's pretty hardcore! I love it.

Yes, COFFEH! Lovely how the British accent comes packaged with a characterless stare into the void and a face stretched completely vertical.

Happy birthday!

Only days later I suddenly realized that the Star Trek movie had ensign Ricky in it, and it made me laugh hard.

It'd be awesome, and maybe motion-sickening, if they were to be able to make the camera behave like that. It's not impossible, it's basically an extrapolation of the sort of effect we already see with Gears of War's roadie run, plus some randomized AI moves steering the pulling up after your avatar. The game seems to be going for an Assassin's Creed vibe more than the Zelda thing that seemed to belong to the previous generation of games. Today, it's all about scalability and parkour.

So, any love for Star Trek here? I really liked watching it, because it has snazzy lines, interesting characters and beautiful visuals. Plotwise the movie is a large, gaping cesspool of holes and impossibilities, which you have to embrace or overlook if you want to get any enjoyment out of it.

Yeah, Miffy's a villain. Happy birthday Rusalka! Give us some weird stories and/or pics!

I couldn't even finish the goddamn story trailer. Had to put it off, because it was so bad. Why bother making another Final Fantasy when your story is the exact same thing as every other game you've ever made? Oppressive tyrannical city-state, hunted rebel group, lead character that once fought for the bad guys but now joins the outcasts... It's so uninspired. I continue in my absolute bafflement why the entire world is so enchanted with cookie-cutter drivel like Final Fantasy. Once perhaps inventive, now a dusty caricature of itself.

You must be shitting me. Elmuerte. I could never get through LBA1 because of the harsh difficulty. LBA2 was only slightly less brutal, but infinitely more pleasant a world to traverse. Or worlds, rather. Up until then I had never played a game with that scope; starting out with a few delightful islands of mystery, and suddenly blowing up with you going to the MOON and a completely different planet with a goddamn subplanet inside it. That just blew my mind! LBA1 had its charm, obviously. But LBA2 was far more epic and playable

That may have been a bit trollish, but it doesn't change my initial comment that the storytrailer of XIII is pretty weak. Your point stands though; if you don't mind the story being reiterated and like different things returning every time, good for you. My perspective, however, IS that of the outsider. I see a gameseries that's tauted as being the most enchanting and rich, and then a trailer full of clichés. I think that's fair criticism. Zelda, by the way, mixes up things pretty well. The characters and story stay roughly the same, and the real changes lie in the world and dungeons, which (though thematically familiar) are all freshly designed, with new gameplay twists. A key difference is that Zelda specifically uses the iconic (or repetitive, however you want) nature of its features by presenting them as legends. It's a legend, a primal story that's being retold over the generations. Generations of consoles

"Horrendous" being quite the wrong word, here.

I played through half of Final Fantasy 7, after which I quit because it was too uncaptivating. I saw people play through large chunks of FF9 and FF12. Not playing it myself helped, though, and I didn't mind watching along at all. There's pretty graphics and beautiful music, so at least it's not a bore to watch

Yeah, no, I understand why people play the games; they can be addicting, if you like the systems en mechanics behind it, if you can sink your teeth into them, whatever. The thing that just irks me is that as Final Fantasy is such a high profile series, and seeing as how they have a huge emphasis on story, it ought to be a lot better. And since it's so bad, there should be a lot more boo-hissing going on because it's so awful. But apart from that, even though it's not my genre, I totally get the appeal of the series. Toblix, also, is pretty gay, I heard.

I was intruiged by this game in my youth, but never played. Looking at the screenshots today I'd estimate that it'll be very hard to get into it now, if you're not carrying a nostalgic feeling for it, yesno? Also, it has a sort of Little Big Adventure vibe to it, visually.

That is the most depressing thing I've read all day.

I was kind of expecting a comment along this lines, and the answer is quite simple. Zelda/Mario games are not story games. They construct their games around a loose framework (princess in need, hero must rise, nothing more), and the entire game long the emphasis is not on plot development but on the game's mechanics and progess in terms of environments, levels, dungeons. It doesn't matter that their stories are the same because the focus lies with the interesting new dungeon designs, et cetera. With Final Fantasy, of course, story DOES play a huge role. It's what they present first and foremost: the characters, the events, the plot twists. There are abundant cinematics en dialogues and everything. So a generic, badly paced, uninspired story does in fact massively hurt these games. Or should, at least, but they seem to be covered with a critique-resistant teflon coating.